1. Technical Field
The invention disclosed and claimed herein generally pertains to an apparatus and method for providing printer separator pages, to divide or separate different documents or other discrete batches of printed pages. More particularly, the invention pertains to an apparatus of the above type wherein the same type of blank paper or sheets are used for both the separator pages and respective pages of the printed documents or batches. Even more particularly, the invention pertains to an apparatus of the above type wherein different visually distinguishable separator pages may be printed to identify the respective documents of different users, or of different host computers that use the same printer.
2. Description of Related Art
At present, both black ink printers and color printers may be provided with multiple paper trays, together with necessary software, in order to produce separator pages between different documents, or other batches of printed pages. A separator page is typically a colored sheet of paper, such as blue or yellow, that is inserted into a designated printer tray. The printer will print a header onto the colored paper when a user requests that a specified document or batch be printed. Immediately after the separator page has been printed, the specified print job is printed out on white paper, or on other paper that is different in color from the separator page. Thus, the separator page provides a simple but effective visual means to enable a user to readily distinguish respective pages of the specified print job from pages of another, immediately preceding print job.
Herein, the terms, “batch” and “print batch” are used to refer to all the pages collectively resulting from any discrete print job or printing task assigned to a printer. These include, without limitation, documents, single pages, multiple copies of the same page, and any other discrete sequence of pages, wherein respective pages are to be kept together.
Notwithstanding its benefits, there are a number of problems with the above present approach for producing separator pages. For example, a user could run out of colored paper and be forced to put white paper into the separator tray. This could also happen inadvertently. In either case, the resulting separator page would be of very limited benefit, since the boundary between two successively printed batches could generally not be determined by quick visual inspection. Alternatively, a user could run out of white paper and be forced to print desired documents or other batches on the colored separator paper. Once again, it would not be easy to quickly distinguish between the separator page and the pages of adjacent printed batches. Moreover, the present approach requires two separate trays that must both be kept supplied with paper to ensure proper operation. This, in turn necessitates additional time and effort, and extra hardware will generally be needed to support operation of the additional separator paper tray. The additional hardware tends to increase printer cost and maintenance requirements.